Milton Babbitt

A LIFE OF LEARNING Milton Babbitt Charles Homer Haskins Lecture American Council of Learned Societies ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 17 ISSN 1041-536X 1983 Maynard Mack Sterling Professor of English, Emeritus Yale University 1984 Mary Rosamond Haas Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus University of California, Berkeley 1985 Lawrence Stone Dodge Professor of History Princeton University 1986 Milton V Anastos Professor Emeritus of Byzantine Greek and History University of California, Los Angeles 1987 Carl E. Schorske Professor Emeritus of History Princeton University 1988 John Hope Franklin James B. Duke Professor Emeritus Duke University 1989 Judith N. Shklar John Cowles Professor of Government Harvard University 1990 Paul Oskar Kristeller Frederick J. E. Woodbridge Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Columbia University 1991 Milton Babbitt William Shubael Conant Professor Emeritus of Music Princeton University A LIFE OF LEARNING Milton Babbitt Charles Homer Haskins Lecture American Council of Learned Societies ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 17 CharlesHomer Haskins (1870-193 7), for whom the ACLS lecture series is named, was the first Chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1920-26. He began his teaching career at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the B.A. degree in 1887, and the Ph.D. in 1890. He later taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard,where he was Henry CharlesLea Professor of Medieval History at the time of his retirement in 1931, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1908 to 1924. He served as president of the American Historical Association, 1922, and was a founder and the second president of the Medieval Academy of America, 1926. A great American teacher, Charles Homer Haskins also did much to establish the reputation of American scholarship abroad.His distinction was recognized in honorary degrees from Strasbourg, Padua, Manchester,Paris, Louvain, Caen, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Allegheny College, where in 1883 he had begun his higher education at the age of thirteen. Milton Babbitt, the 1991 Charles Homer Haskins Lecturer, was born in 1916 in Philadelphia.He was educated in the public schools of Jackson, Mississippi, and at New York and Princeton Universities. His primary teacher of musical composition was Roger Sessions, with whom he studied privately for three years. At present, he is William Shubael Conant Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, where his teaching career began in 1938, including three years as a member of the Mathe- maticsfaculty, from 1942-45. He also is on the Composition Faculty of The JuilliardSchool, and was Fromm Foundation Visiting Professorat Harvard University in 1988. A co-founder and member of the Committee of Direction, Colum- bia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, since 1959, Professor Babbitt has been a Visiting Professor at the Rubin Academy at Jerusalem, the University of Wisconsin, and Composer-in-Residence at New York Uni- versity. He has taught, conducted seminars, and lectured at various universities and schools of music in this country and in Austria, Austra- lia, Canada, England, Germany (Darmstadt), and Mexico. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His honors include: two New York Music Critics Circle Citations (1949, 1964); NationalInstitute of Arts and Letters Award (1959); Brandeis University Gold Medal (1970); National Music Award (1976); Pulitzer Prize Special Citation (1982); George Peabody Medal (1983); MacArthur Fellow (1986-91); Gold Medal in Music of the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters; Music Award of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters; and Guggenheim Fellow.He has received honorary degreesfrom Middlebury College, New York University, Swarthmore College, New England Con- servatory, University of Glasgow, Northwestern University, Brandeis Uni- versity, and Princeton University. Professor Babbitts articles have appeared in such periodicals as Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Music Theory, Musical Quarterly, and The Score, and in anthologies, including Perspectives on Contem- porary Music Theory, Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Per- spectives in Musicology, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, The Orchestral Composer's Point of View, Twentieth Century Views of Music History, Esthetics Contemporary, and Words About Music (ed. by Dembski and Straus). His most recent compositions include: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Transfigured Notes (for the PhiladelphiaOrchestra), The Joy of More Sextets (forviolin andpiano), Whirled Series (forsaxophone and piano), Consortini (forfive players). The most recent recordings of his music are of Paraphrases (by Parnas- sus, on CRI), Composition for Guitar (by David Starobin, on Bridge), piano music (by Robert Taub, on Harmonia Mundi), Piano Concerto and The Head of the Bed on New World Records, Groupwise, An Elizabethan Sextette, and Time Series on CRI, Sextets and The Joy of More Sextets on New World Records, and the Widow's Lament on Nonesuch. The Haskins Lecture was presented on Thursday evening, April 25, at Georgetown University, as part of the 1991 ACLS Annual Meeting. Iam grateful and flattered to have had my talk this evening included under the ongoing rubric of 'A Life of Learning", but in all accuracy and necessary realism I must be permitted the protective sub-rubric of "A Composer of a Certain Age", for how might a composer justify his presence before learned representatives of learned bodies, when the very term "learned" has appeared and disappeared in the history of music only in the most apologetic and fugitive of roles, in such expres- sions as "learned writing" or- more specifically - "learned counter- point," usually with the intimation of the anachronistic, the factitious, and - even - the jejune? There does appear to have been a fleeting moment or so in eighteenth century France when the term "learned" was invoked to characterize a "taste" distinguished from the "general." Apparently, compositions were deemed to be "learned" if it was thought that their understanding demanded some musical knowledge. But this elitist distinction did not, could not, survive the guillotine, and never was to be reheaded, certainly not with the subsequent and continuing triumph of what Goodman has called the Tingle-Immersion theory, which - when applied to music - demands that music be anyone's anodyne, a non-habit forming nepenthe. I could dig even deeper historically and dare to remind you that, in the medieval curriculum, music was a member of the Quadrivium, but that curriculum, like so many demanding curricula after it, has long since been banished. And, in any case consider the company that music kept in the Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. If that curriculum had survived, music would be burdened further with guilt by association, since - for reasons apparently more sociological than methodological- there is no characterization which guarantees music more immediate, automatic, and ultimate derogation and dismissal than "mathematical," thereby joining "learned" and, above all, "academic." But it is as academics that we join here this evening. I trust it does not come as a surprise, or as an unpleasant embarrassment, or as further evidence of the Greshamization of the university, to learn that there are composers in your very midst on your faculties. Apparently there still are those who remain unaware of our presence, and even more who are unaware of the significances and causes of our presence. But there is no more consequential evidence of the intellectual, institutional reorientation of musical composition in our time and country than the fact that the overwhelming majority of our composers are university 1 trained and/or university teachers, and that for this and other reasons - the university has become, awarely or unawarely, directly and indirectly, the patron of and haven for not just composers, but for music in all of its serious manifestations. This state of affairs began at that crucial moment for music in this country in the mid-thirties, was inter- rupted by World War II, and accelerated and spread after that war. There were isolated spots of enlightenment much earlier, but the fate of Edward MacDowell at Columbia University early in the twentieth century was a more characteristic symptom of the state of music in the academic community. MacDowell, having recently returned from musical training in Europe the customary journey of the American composer at that time- and hardly a wild radical, either musically or otherwise, was determined to in his own words "teach music scientifically and technically with a view to teaching musicians who shall be competent to teach and compose." But the new president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, who in this regard at least was slightly ahead of his time, set a precedent for future administrative attitudes toward music in the university, by opposing MacDowell, proposing instead what MacDowell described as a "coedu- cational department store" at Teachers College. Butler triumphed; MacDowell resigned. That was three decades before the cataclysm which carried the transformation of thinking in and about music in that sudden reversal of its former path between Europe and this country and, not entirely coincidentally, carried me to the chief port-of-call at the end of that journey, making my musical, academic life chronologically co-extensive with that decisively new musical era and the subsequent, almost immediate change in the role of the composer in academic society. For I, in very early 1934, transferred to New York University's Washington Square College because of a book, a book that by current standards would appear to be a modest makeshift of a book, but it was the first book written in this country on twentieth century music, and- indeed it was entitled Twentieth Century Music. The author was Marion Bauer, an American composer born in Walla-Walla who had studied in France and returned to teach here and it must be admit- ted - to collect and assemble snippets of musical journalism and other trifles into a book.

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